by Nick Schager
[This week's "Retro Active" pick is inspired by Tim Burton and Johnny Depp's fish-out-of-water vampire comedy Dark Shadows.] Pair a flagging comedian with a floundering horror director and what you get is
Vampire in Brooklyn, a marriage made in horror-comedy hell courtesy of
Eddie Murphy and
Wes Craven. The mid-90s-isms of this wretched collaboration are plentifulâ€"cue Salt-n-Pepa's "Whatta Man" to underline Murphy's alpha-male sexiness?â€" and yet they're the least of this film's problems, so misbegotten and poorly executed is its every element. Working from a story co-conceived by Murphy and a script co-written by Murphy's yet-to-be-
Chappelle's-Show-famous brother
Charlie, Craven's pre-
Scream debacle gets clunky wit' it from the get-go. Before we've even seen him, Maximillian (Murphy) narrates the set-up: with all his brethren dead, Max has left his Bermuda Triangle island home to find and marry the last of his line, who happens to be living (unaware of her vampiric nature) in Brooklyn. Given Craven's Haiti voodoo-themed
The Serpent and the Rainbow, Max's nationality suggests that the filmmaker has a particular conception of the Caribbean as a hotbed of exotic evil. Those nonsensical notions, though, are overshadowed by the more basic absence of craft on display, as evidenced by an intro scene in which, after Max's ship crashes into a dock, John Witherspoon's hands-flailing caretaker investigates the vessel and finds a murdered crew in one amusement park ride-style close-up after another.
Continued reading RETRO ACTIVE: Vampire in Brooklyn (1995)...
